Chad Z. Hower aka Kudzu wrote: > I looked at Singularity about 2 years back. I haven't looked at it since > then. I spent the last 2 years developing a lot of ideas etc. Today I > reviewed newer info on Singularity. Its pretty much 100% inline with what > I've designed. There are some differences of course, but the major parts are > pretty identical. > > That being said - moving forward how do you guys see SharpOS being > different? >
Personally, our goals aren't *too* different, AFAICT. We both are writing an OS running under a bare-metal CLR, with a microkernel design. However, Singularity's singular goal (sorry the pun) is to be research-oriented towards mathematically verifiable formal security. This includes creating a subset of C# with formal-verification language constructs. Whereas with SharpOS, I would see a general purpose operating system, written in pure C#, C++/CLI, or really any CLR-compliant source language, without any new compiler-level language constructs necessary. Obviously custom attributes and a custom compiler are okay here. But the source language itself is the same general-purpose C# that "everyone else" knows. On a further level, in my design for Ensemble that I would be advocating in the future for SharpOS, I see a more interactive text-based console working at the object level (Monad / Powershell on steroids), with more interactivity than just a Unix prompt. I take the inspiration and initial ideas for this from a series of IRC chats I had years back with Slava Pestov, the author of jEdit and the Factor programming language. See the interactive console of Factor for more information. Afterwards, elements of distributed processing from Plan9 would be integrated. As this is a microkernel design, communication between apps and microkernel services would be through the same basic form of in-VM .Net Remoting as would be needed for physically-distributed services. One uses an in-memory protocol, while the other uses an over-the-network protocol. But to the app, it is transparently distributable. This goes along with a resurgence of the "home / department app server with partially-run-locally apps running on semi-dumb terminals" physical computing idea that was from a few years back, and is coming back lately. Filesystem wise, an object pool variant of ZFS would be appropriate. Data moves away from being a named file into a persisted object (still a file in the end, but more OO), with tagged attributes and relations between objects, rather than hierarchical directories. That's in my design paper, IIRC. Anyway, that was my overarching idea. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ SharpOS-Developers mailing list SharpOS-Developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sharpos-developers
